Video connections through the internet and cellphone networks enable face-to-face and real time communication between people located at different parts of the world. As network communications have become faster and more reliable, both person to person and business multimedia communications are increasingly popular with integrated video cameras on smart phones, touch pads, laptop or desktop computers, and television sets. However, such kind of video communication is still no comparison to direct face-to-face meeting in terms of communication quality and effect. One of the problems is lacking of eye contacts during video conversation, because each of the communicators commonly looks at the video screen and not at the video camera, preventing the communicator from having direct eye-to-eye contact to the other remote viewers, as the video cameras are usually positioned away from the screen.
Eye contact is an important part of human interaction, for it conveys non verbal information in a subtle way. In a natural human interaction, we use our facial expression and eye contact to assist our expression. On the other hand, lacking of eye contact during a conversation makes virtual interaction unnatural. People usually dislike this behavior, since most people regard lacking eye contact during a conversation as lack of connection. It is unacceptable if a person looks away while talking, which will be perceived as unconfident, insincere and socially awkward, and his personality can be in jeopardy as the listeners may judge him as inattentive, untrustworthy, pretentious, even rude and snobby.
From speaker side of the view, if a listener is not making eye contact with the speaker while he or she is talking, the speaker may perceive that his or her topic is not interesting to the audience, or the speaker is not convincing enough to get the point crossed. Some speakers may cut short of the conversation for lacking of eye communication.
Another negative effect of having a video camera located on the margin of a display screen is that the image of people in the video is distorted and abnormal. The top portion of a human head looks larger and his or her chin looks smaller, when the camera is mounted on the upper part of the screen, like most laptop computer does currently. This is another problem causing unnatural video communication.
In order to solve the above problems and make the video communication looks more like a real face to face meeting, which means that the participants of the video communication can make eye contact to each other during the meeting, it is necessary to let the participants look at the web cam and the display simultaneously. A participant has to focus his or her eyes on the web cam in order to make eye contact with people who are viewing the image, meanwhile the participant has to look at the display so that he or she can see images of people participating the conference at a remote site. This technical difficulty of the device hampering video communication has been studied and a number of methods to mitigate the problem have been proposed.
US patent application publication 20130207952 disclosed a design that the web cam is mounted at the center of the display instead of on the top frame of the display as conventional design. By way of the above configuration, when a local user (the conference participant) looks at the center of display screen his or her eyes are lined up with the camera, and thereby the image of the local user shows eye contact.
The above disclosed design brought the web cam inline with the display. However, part of the display is occupied by the camera and its accessory parts.
U.S. Pat. No. 8,570,423 disclosed a video conference system with a projection display. Both projector and video camera are mounted behind a transparent projection screen so that the local user can view the display image and at the same time looks at the camera through the transparent screen. Therefore the camera can capture an eye contact image of the local user. However, it is difficult to use such system for mobile video conferencing.
U.S. Pat. No. 8,199,185 disclosed a video conferencing system with a semireflective transparent panel having an angle of about 30 to 70 degree with a display for reflecting an image of a local user. A video camera disposed on a side of the semireflective transparent panel opposite the image display.
U.S. Pat. No. 8,253,776 disclosed an image synthesis method to synthesis eye contact image from non-eye-contact images of a local user. However, it is difficult to synthesis a nature dynamic eye image in a real time with an ordinary image processor in a mobile device.
In view of the above problems, there is a need to develop an improved video communicating device with a convenient yet reliable design to enable eye contact between a local user and the corresponding image of a remote user participating the communication.